


Aquila

by LNJames



Series: Suddenly Everything Has Changed [17]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-06-15 07:53:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19609240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LNJames/pseuds/LNJames
Summary: Kara Danvers must work through the damage done by the Agents of Liberty and Lex Luthor to her friends, to the country, and to Lena Luthor. Compassion begins when fear is confronted.Season 4 re-imagined. Canon-ish, with liberties and justice for all.





	1. Altair

_The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole,_  
_to know where you are, to be the point of intersection_  
_of all the lines drawn through all the stars,_  
_to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love._  
_To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening,_  
_to tame the animal,_  
_to let the soul go wild,_  
_to shelter in darkness and blaze with light,_  
_to cease to speak and be perfectly understood. - R. Solnit_

She doesn’t talk about it much, only when she wants to help others find their way out of a difficult situation. Sometimes she shares a detail here or there, a hint of what it was like just so the people she cares about can understand her point of view a little better, maybe understand why she’s like the way she is. As if that were entirely possible. As if it were easy to understand the distance between stars or the way light fooled her, spinning on the edge of an event horizon and making her think that she could escape. Even when her eyes no longer saw anything at all outside of her pod prison, when her world went deathly quiet, when her mind played tricks on her, there was something that kept her from completely and resolutely giving up. She wouldn’t expect humans to know what the Phantom Zone did to her and how it made her feel. Yet here she is: Kara Danvers, the pretender, Kara Zor-El, the survivor, Supergirl, the hero. And Linda Lee, the replica. All of that and more.

On earth, far from that endless spin in space, most people now expect something else from her - strength, of course, but also the things that come with it. They don’t know that she made certain choices to be who she is. She chose compassion. She chose hope. She chose to help. She stepped into the light and became a symbol made of stone and steel. She doesn’t bend, she doesn’t break. Most people assume she’s strong because she’s an alien with super powers gifted by the sun, a marvel of science and biology and lucky cosmic convergence. That is true.

What only a few know, though, is that her strength also comes from the dark. It comes from the darkest place. She didn’t survive the Phantom Zone to become who she is now without learning to love the parts of her that absorbed all the colors of light, the parts that sustained her on the taste of oblivion. A darkness like that changed her. It sparked atoms inside until they burned blue, it made her skin and bone and muscle seek what fed it for so long, and it shifted how her body now inhabits the world of light.

Kara is two sides of the same coin, split down the middle, and split again. First person, second person, third person. Not her, or her, but her, and her. She just never knew how acutely that could hurt, to contain multitudes and to be all of that and more. How could she?

 _Traitor_. The word still burns. _Snowbird_. It freezes. _Kara_. And it breaks.

***

Kara glanced down at her feet as they walked a familiar path, mindful of the space between each block of concrete as she made her way. She held an iced coffee from Noonan’s dangling from her fingers, half consumed, an after thought on her journey. Soon, the sidewalk turned to brick in a quiet neighborhood of brownstones and little yards with flowers framed by short wrought-iron fencing. Mid-morning in the early summer was bright, cool still. The commuters downtown had already made their way to their desks, all the buses and trains ran on time, buildings of glass and stone and concrete rose to the north of her. National City in all its glory was still standing after the country around it shook. The Agents of Liberty and Lockwood had left their ugly mark, the President and his campaign of hate had lost, Supergirl came out bruised but still standing. All that damage meant no one was left unmarked. That was why she was walking. The air was tainted now and she wanted it back, some day.

One step forward, two steps back.

Stopping, she glanced up at the brick two story brownstone, flower boxes full of red geraniums, a stoop and threshold passed over by many. Not much had changed on the outside in the year since she had last been here, back when Kara thought she was better, back when she had been better. She smiled slightly as she looked at the small familiar signage.

_Dr. Susan Meadows, M.D. Private Practice. By Appt Only._

The outside looked the same but everything had changed on the inside of her. How could it not? Kara and everyone she loved had gone through months and days and hours full of joy and heartbreak, a life lived in a world that shifted around them all. The big difference this time was that was that when she stepped into the familiar quiet sitting area in a tastefully decorated walkup, she knew she wasn’t alone in this and didn’t have to be. She had Alex back, her family, her friends. They all knew what she had been through and understood and encouraged.

All those times before now, reluctantly or nervously, Kara Danvers had confronted her own thoughts and feelings and fears alone. The panic attacks, brought on by Psi, had been symptoms of her year of remembering a fear so deep it rivaled the dark from where it came. Dr. M had called it her ‘season of struggle’; Kara had called it what it was. Painful. Scary. Terrifying. But in the end, she had come out of it better, healed in enough ways that she was able to go back to her life, at CatCo, at the DEO, with a different perspective, different tools. Stronger, yes.

But her mind never forgot, no matter how much she talked about it. Her eyes couldn’t unsee a dying planet and the dark that followed for so long she thought her eyes no longer worked. Her body could not unlearn how time felt when it stopped moving. Her heart, the strongest part of her, still beat in time to the way her pod had circled around and around an event horizon, never moving yet never staying, always on the edge of endless loss. Dr. M had tried to give her ways to think about what had happened, ways to cope with her life here on Earth. It mostly helped. But here she was again, circling back to a place that gave her peace or enough of it. Enough that she was the one who suggested it when Eliza gently probed during their traditional Sunday phone catch up. Kara had suggested going back to Dr. M because she couldn’t think of anything else that might work this time. Alex even said she would join sometime, if it would help, if Kara wanted.

“Kara. It’s so nice to see you.”

At the sound of a familiar voice, she turned towards the door that had opened. Dr. Meadows was a short woman, a decade older than Eliza, gray hair trimmed close in a stylish pixie. She wore jeans and a faded black sweater and when she smiled, her eyes followed in delight as she reached her hands out to Kara who stood and reached back.

“Dr. M.”

She smiled back at the woman who had helped her put the pieces back together once before and wondered if she could perform the same magic again. Here, in Dr. M’s office, Kara was just someone who wanted her life back.. If Kara thought the year before had unraveled them – with the Worldkillers and Reign and her own fear, this year had done the damage threefold. Secrets were like that, little bombs that ballooned out and embedded shrapnel in every part of their lives. The Girl of Steel was not as impervious as she thought. Who could blame her for wanting to try to put the pieces back together again? And honestly, after everything, after feeling her life force seep out of her in the woods, after losing Alex, effectively, to a mind wipe, Lena too, after confronting her own misguided doppelganger and absorbing the pain and confusion and ambiguous loss of a piece of her ripped, mistreated, and reunited – Kara wanted things back, all the things. She was tired of watching the things she loved disappear and the hold loss had on her no matter what she did. And if Kara didn’t do something, didn’t try, then what?

***

_“I have something to tell you.”_

_That was what had started it all cascading away. It was a small moment, something Kara might have forgotten in the golden light of morning. It was the last time Lena knew, completely and clearly, who she was. They had spent the night together despite the fact that they had agreed not to, despite the fact that they had committed to becoming friends again after the year of Reign and the disagreements they had, the split they endured. They were in Kara’s bed, sleep tousled and otherwise sated. Lena had put her hand against Kara’s chest and that’s when she heard it, another heartbeat, hers, but not her. It was also then that Lena told her everything, suspicions, fragments, ideas, theories, possibilities. Nothing concrete except her plan. It would change everything._

_“Kara, I don’t know what he is doing or has done, but I know somehow Lex is involved. You’re not safe.”_

_Kara had propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at Lena, trying to make sense of it all._

_“What you’re telling me is that you think your brother created a copy of me from his prison cell and he’s out to get us both.”_

_She watched as Lena sat up, pulling the sheets around her until only her shoulders were bare in the early morning light. None of this made sense._

_“No, I don’t exactly how or if there is another you, yet, but what I am saying, Kara, is that I think something bad is going to happen to you and I want to prevent it.”_

_Here Kara sat up too and blew out a frustrated breath, running her hand through her hair to get it out of her face. She tried not to sound skeptical, but honestly, it was too hard to keep it out of her mouth given the implications and what Lena proposed._

_“So you have a hunch about the future and nothing more so you’re going to inject yourself with some dangerous chemical you made to forget me. To keep me safe. To keep the strongest person in this world safe. Do you know how crazy you sound?”_

_When it came out of her mouth like that, Kara wanted to take it back just from the look it inspired on Lena’s face._

_“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that.”_

_She hadn’t meant it that way, but what Lena was talking about, impossible ideas mysteriously connected to the future, made Kara wonder. What had Lena been up to the last few months and weeks down in her L-Corp lab alone - had their experience with the Worldkillers, with Sam somehow affected Lena more than Kara could have known? It sounded like crazy talk even if suggesting it outloud was impolite, the fact remained that Kara could not believe what she was hearing, what Lena had planned to do. It wasn’t like she was a stranger to strange ideas, multiverses and other worlds and the future, she just wasn’t there yet on this one and it wasn’t like Lena to bust out a wild conjecture without facts._

_“Sorry, I just..I don’t get it. You believe there is a replica of me out in the world based on some theoretical properties of the Harun-El…”_

_“Yes.”_

_“And you think your brother Lex Luthor - the one still sitting in his jail cell at Striker’s Island last time we checked - is somehow involved as part of his grand plan.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“And so, in order to hypothetically save me in this possible future, you’re going to Metropolis tomorrow so Sam can help you forget everything you know about me.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“All based on a hunch.”_

_“Yes. And based on a set of theories, traces of evidence, several mathematical simulations, a few critical numbers adding up, and intuitively knowing my brother better than you do.”_

_Kara closed her eyes and took in a deep breath._

_“You are going to effectively wipe your brain of ..us...to save me.”_

_“Yes.”_

_She opened her eyes and set her jaw, staring at Lena who looked back at her as if this were the most logical thing in the world to propose._

_“No.”_

_Lena opened her mouth and then closed it again, before she scooted a little in the bed to face her full on. Kara watched as green eyes turned darker._

_“First of all, this is my body so I get to do whatever I want with it thank you very much.”_

_Kara nodded because she wouldn’t argue that point._

_“Second, I am not about to risk your safety on the hope that my brother is just idly sitting in his jail cell playing chess with the warden. He can and will hurt you if he knows what you mean to me. The only sure way of protecting both of us is for me to do this while we figure out what is going on. He can’t use what he can’t find. It won’t change what I know about my friend Kara Danvers, it will just remove the memories of who you are in relation to Supergirl. I’ll be like everyone else who doesn’t know your true identity. That’s the biggest threat, that he’ll use me to get to you somehow. I can’t have that.”_

_Her head hurt despite the fact that the sun was rising steadily in her apartment, streaming in on them both as if there were not a care in the world. How did they get from last night, what they shared, to now? It was whiplashing and out of the blue._

_“You said your friend....Kara Danvers. Will your science take away what’s in your heart? What we are to each other?”_

_Lena was quiet and Kara watched her fingers trace a pattern on her sheets, the pale pink cotton ones that reminded Kara of how soft Lena became in them when they were alone. Suddenly, it made her wonder. She stood and took a shaky breath, crossing her arms over her bare chest to protect the softest parts of her too. When no answer was forthcoming, Kara spoke quietly._

_“Lena, you’ve done this before, haven’t you?”_

_Here, she watched as Lena hesitated before she answered._

_“I have.”_

_“Why? Why?”_

_At her quiet question, she saw Lena blink, pulling the sheets tighter around her body._

_“Because it worked.”_

_There had been silence between them for a long time after that, as she wondered what had been lost, what Lena had removed from herself in sacrifice for Kara. It was a moment crystallized in her head and marked by wetness squeezing out of her eyes to roll down her cheeks. She hastily wiped against her face with her arm and turned away, pulling on a robe draped over her chair because she felt too naked, was too exposed.Without fanfare or any other words between them, Lena had gotten dressed and left, the click of the door ringing in Kara’s ears. She was left to deal with the aftermath alone, somehow swallowing a decision based on the barest of evidence and a choice that wasn’t hers to make but deeply affected her nonetheless. It hurt. Hard. Like a bruise or broken bone or all the things that made humans weak._

_The next time Kara saw Lena a week later, it was like any other day at CatCo, with Lena waiting in James’ office happy to see her friend Kara Danvers after her trip to Metropolis. They talked about Ruby’s soccer game as if nothing had happened, as if nothing was amiss, as if Kara didn’t know that Lena no longer remembered loving her, all the parts of her that mattered. Just another day in National City for a superhero who kept losing the people that mattered most to her._

***

“So...”

Kara looked down at her hands and didn’t know how to continue now that she was actually sitting down in the chair she knew well, comfortable but not too comfortable, soft but not too soft. It had taken her awhile to find her words the last time she was here and now was no different. She wasn’t sure where to start or what to say, there was so much to untangle inside her head.

“I’ve been wondering about you.”

At Dr. M’s voice, Kara looked up and crinkled her brows.

“You have?”

“Yes, I’ve been known to think about my clients when I don’t see them.”

“Oh..I’m sorry, should I have..called? Or emailed? I’ve been really, uh, busy..and you know..”

Dr M smiled at her softly and held up her hand.

“Kara, no need to apologize or explain. I just wanted to tell you that I had been thinking about you. I’m glad to see you.”

“Oh.”

For someone whose words had been mightier than her cape this time around, she was at a loss.

“You’ve had a hard year.”

Sometimes Dr. M was better at stating the obvious than she was and it helped her orient. Those first few sessions, when her panic attacks from Psi were so bad she couldn’t think straight, this office offered her a chance to fall into her words and how she talked about how she felt in her own way. When she first came to see Dr. Meadows, all those many months ago, Kara could only talk about what troubled her mind in the third person. Not Kara. But someone like her who had survived in darkness and silence after losing everything. Dr M played along whenever she slipped into removing herself from the conversation. _What must that be like for someone so young, Kara? Imagine what might comfort that person, what words would you say to someone who went through that? I wonder if that person realizes how strong they were to survive that. It sounds like that person was brave to choose kindness and hope after experiencing something like that._ It helped, it really did. Kara got better or at least she felt better and she tried to talk more about it with others, with Alex..Eliza...Lena, in small ways, sometimes. But here she was again.

“Everyone did.”

“Yes, but you, Kara, you had a hard year.”

Dr. Meadows looked at her, eyes clear and focused enough that Kara had to blink. She looked down at her hands and twisted her fingers together a little before pressing her palms against the dark fabric of her work slacks to smooth out what wasn’t wrinkled. She almost reached for the little couch pillow she had gifted Dr. M on her last official appointment. It sat on the other end and had Kryptonian words stitched and interwoven among the leaves, branches, and roots of a green tree. _Shahrrehth. Vokai. Urkynon._ Hope. Help. Compassion. It’s what Dr. M gave her so she could give the same to the world.

“I did. Yes.”

She didn’t know where to start.

“Maybe we should think about starting from a time when you had your best day. Would you be okay with me hearing about when you felt peaceful and content, happy even, full of light?”

She glanced up and smiled. The weight would always be there to carry and unpack, but joy was fleeting sometimes so it might be nice to hold on to that thread first. It could carry her through the rest of what it meant to come to terms with being Kara - all of the Karas inside of her connected by the same threads.

“Then I want to talk about Lena.”


	2. Alshain

As with all things, there were many ways to get from Point A to Point B. It was something Cat Grant had taught her, using her own spin on the Socratic Method, always pushing Kara from one side to another. It took her a few years to figure out what Cat was trying to do and why she cared enough to do it. _If you’re not who I think you are, what does it matter? Glasses, or I take it as a confirmation._ It was one of those talks that came late at night after Kara pulled out a last minute save courtesy of her super hearing. Her boss was in the midst of being blackmailed and Kara was in the middle of family drama. Non and Astra had conspired to lay plans of destruction, but it was Kara’s investigative skills that had saved the day. Miss Grant had called it a crisis averted, how could Kara have known then that it was the beginning of a new story and the end of another? It was a form of love, Cat asking questions with answers that meant everything would change if said out loud, if spoken. Kara could neither confirm nor deny Cat Grant anything and that was answer enough.

If she had known then what she knew now, Kara might have done things differently with Lena Luthor. She might have told her the truth on that day they met again in an office of white high above National City. The _Venture_ accident was an accident orchestrated by her brother from behind bars, but not telling Lena that they were not strangers was on purpose. Both were high crimes and low misdemeanors in the continuum of right and wrong, black and white. Kara never thought she’d be living in the gray after all that deep, deep Phantom Zone darkness where all light was absorbed. How could she tell Lena about the way her hands remembered catching a girl in the dark a decade ago. How could she tell Lena that she knew. _She knew_. And Kara pretended she didn’t, again and again and again. It was as hard and as painful as it had been with Alex after the mindwipe. The act of knowing and the act of keeping secrets - Kara was getting too good at both, by necessity or by design, it mattered not the reason, the toll was the same. It all equaled loss. Kara’s voice was quiet as she looked up from where her hands had been fighting each other in her lap.

“It’s complicated. And messy.”

“Love always is.”

Dr. M was looking at her gently, kindly. They were both in their familiar spots, Kara on the pale yellow mid century modern couch and Dr. Meadows across from her in one of the worn leather Morris chairs. Kara smiled slightly and reached for the pillow - _Shahrrehth Vokai Urkynon_ \-- pulling it into her lap as she shook her head a little.

“Yes, but I’m not talking about love. I mean I am, I guess, but...it’s..something else.”

Here, she searched for the right words again, trying to describe what it meant to have to hide something from someone you love to keep them safe. And how that meant losing a part of yourself every minute they are unaware that you are not there, fully, completely, living the moment with them. It reminded her of how Winn had given her a copy of _The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows_ as a joke but when she read it, it wasn't that funny and it didn’t feel like fictional words for the feelings she experienced. _Exulansis_. A fictional human word to describe how Kara felt when she couldn’t find any human words to explain how she felt since no one understood Krytponian or what it meant to fall from the stars, speed and velocity singing through her. She took a breath because telling that to Dr. M would not help right now.

“It’s about me. And how I am with people. And who I am.”

“Ok. That can also be complicated.”

Kara let her fingers run along the front of the pillow, the embroidered trees full of lines she followed, raised leaves and branches and roots all taking her from Point A to Point B.

“Well, it’s been extra complicated this year. And who I am to others..wasn’t always..clear.”

Dr. Meadows had signed a DEO NDA when Kara first came to see her, after Psi and after everything felt like it was trying to escape her body because her mind played tricks on her. She knew Kara’s secret identity because she needed to in order to help and to understand. Alex had interviewed her herself, making sure she was right for Kara, was safe. So in this office, she didn’t need to hide. That wasn’t the problem.

“You may know this Walt Whitman quote: ‘ _Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.’_ It reminds me of you, Kara. You contain multitudes.”

She glanced over at Dr. M and shrugged, a small smile coming unbidden.

“That’s an understatement.”

“People have so much potential inside, so many paths to choose. Multitudes of possibilities. What must it feel like to have such abundance? To be surrounded by bounty within?”

Kara shook her head, smiling at the reframe.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, I like that. Because it doesn’t always feel like..a good thing..”

Dr. M looked at her and nodded, her fingers lacing together in her lap.

“It can be a heavy lift too. To hold all of who you are, Kara.”

“Yeah..”

They grew quiet for a bit, because heavy was the cost. Even for a superhero.

“So you were going to tell me about Lena.”

At the name, Kara could feel her face react to the name, smiling slightly even if she closed her eyes for a moment. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Lena, it was how it came out of her sometimes. It was complicated and messy because of history and experiences and events, things they both did or didn’t do, words they said or didn’t say. How she had to be when Lena knew her and when Lena forgot her. That alone could keep her on this couch forever. Add in Alex and how she lost her sister the same way she lost Lena, for a time, but that very acute painful time was enough to make her hands squeeze the pillow a little too hard. She had lost the feeling of being known when both Lena and Alex forgot who she was.

And she wasn’t even sure how she could ever talk about the feelings that came when she re-absorbed Linda Lee. _Red Daughter_. That little lost multitude had loved Lena too, envied Kara having the Alex she had, the life Kara had made for herself, but still, her lost star had given herself up to become whole again. How could she ever explain that in human words?

“I will, but I think I need to start over.”

It was like Dr. M once told her, she could pick up the needle on the record playing over and over again in her head anytime she wanted to restart what she heard, to play a different song if she wanted. Kara couldn’t talk about Lena without talking about herself. It would come full circle if she let it.

***

_Picking a side was never the problem. It was always the one that was the harder choice, the one that pulled her towards hope, towards compassion. The side wasn’t the problem, it was the consequences that came with that choice that swung Kara through the wringer. Now, as Kara felt her body stick to the floor and harden encased in Nth metal like a suit, she was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. She knelt in the old Lockwood metal factor immobile and impotent while Manchester went after vengeance of the bloody kind. Human hearts in grief made men weak, made them do things they wouldn’t choose because it was easier to give in than to give out. Kara had seen that so many times here on earth that she lost count. All she knew was that she was different, that her alien heart chose in other ways most times. Then again, she had more to lose these days and her heart knew that too. From below, she watched as Lockwood recovered a weapon and raged, his yell down at her to give up the struggle was almost drowned out by the pounding of his wife’s heart. Kara wasn’t about to give up hope for a better ending to this story. She yelled back at him._

_“I’m not struggling, I’m flying.”_

_She reached for the stars, fist raised and let her body remember what it did well. Kara groaned and felt the floor shake, her body starting to rise and with it, the walls around her, With another groan, she kept reaching upward until the building itself shook loose from its foundation, lifted up and then dropped down. Kara felt her bonds shatter around her into a million tiny pieces until the Nth metal fell away. It was just in time for her to catch Lockwood’s wife as she toppled over the catwalk. If that were the end of it, maybe it would have been easier. Reporters called out questions and Lockwood turned the tables, unmasking his own hate and claiming it righteously._

_“What about Supergirl, huh? You know who I am. Who is she?”_

_It had cascaded from there, the roots of evil in the form of a simple question. Except this time, it wasn’t Cat Grant asking out of love, it was the beginning of a country asking out of hate. When she stood in the DEO the next day, it became crystal clear that there were sides taken. The new President of the United States had declared his side in the guise of ‘transparency”. The real reason was to divide us from them through fear and intimidation. Kara knew this day was coming, she had felt it with Cadmus, felt it with the Agents of Liberty. Aliens and others were put on notice and she was not immune._

_“We need to know your secret identity, Supergirl.”_

_She could feel her throat tighten and her breath coming fast. At her hips, she felt her own hands ball into fists. Fight or flight, the urge was strong. Even with Alex next to her, Kara knew what this meant._

_“If I did that sir, everyone I know, everyone I love would be at risk.”_

_She refused, of course she had to and of course it hurt. Everything she had done and given for the country was washed away, the tide turning towards something darker, something more menacing than she could fight with her burning fists and her pounding heart._

_“You’re dismissed, effective immediately...the United States does not want a war with Supergirl.”_

_“Then I trust you won’t start one.”_

_It was her parting shot, pulled from the last of her reserves of stoicism in the face of an impending threat much larger than herself. She practically had to injure herself to keep from letting the hot tears behind her eyes fall out. Even with her sister trying to calm or reason with her, Kara had to escape. In the end, she chose flight as the only way out. The winds had turned with it, the air itself turned acrid and festering with what was brewing in the country she had loyally served and on an earth where an alien had fallen from the stars and did her very best._

_Kara tried, she really did._

***

It was like magic and though she had no words to describe what that meant, she knew she felt it. After so long in the dark with so little, it was something and she would take it. There were trees, so many she could not keep count though she tried, in a language that her mouth tried to learn. один два три. She stopped because there were too many, all standing straight in rows full of empty branches. The air itself was crisp, like an apple she once had. Sweet things were few and far between. Somewhere deep down, her body craved in ways she was still learning. When you come from nothing, have nothing, you take what you can get.

In the stand of trees, she could hear soft sounds, the way each leaf crunched under her boots, the birds singing. It was magic, lifting her higher and higher, her face to the sun, peace and calm and morning birds lifting her with a song. Her body felt light, full of it in fact, and the air held her and somewhere inside, she knew this was where she was meant to be. Far from the rough hands of others who pushed her here or there, tested her limits with their silly games, scratched her ears with their harsh low voices talking about her as if she were not there, as if she were some thing that could not hear or see or think or feel. They called her _Snowbird_ and she knew that was not her name. Birds were singing and underneath their song, she could hear something else, something inside, something that told her she belonged somewhere. In the air, it sounded like a gentle opening and closing, a familiar beat over and over again announcing her place in the family of things.

**Crack!**

And just like that, she is jolted out of the air by the sound of fire and metal and the things of destruction, men breaking the song in her head and in her heart. The birds scatter and with it their song turns to frightened cries. Suddenly, her head is exploding with sounds, all the spaces in between filling up with harshness and painful piercing sounds and she falls. She falls. Her ears hear too much of everything rushing into her, the world now so full she is disoriented. She makes the mistake and opens her eyes and suddenly, she sees. She sees for the very first time everything, bodies of men, the insides, the bones, the things that make them weak and she screams because it is all too much. Her eyes are on fire, her eyes are fire. Everything is painful and out of control and she is afraid. The men, they fall too and they come for her and her body reacts, it fights because there is no other way out but through. And still they come with more metal, jolting her body in ways that make her muscles seize, her body go limp against the bed of leaves, her face pressed into the ground and immobile. The only thing she can think of as her body curls into itself, the only thing that comes out of her mouth is a name that she calls.

_Alex...Alex..._


	3. Tarazed

_In the room she was kept, the paint peeled and it was stark but it is somewhere, some place to be, and that was better than the nothingness she remembered. She didn’t know if she liked where she was and she said as much. She didn’t know what she liked or where she came from or who she was. Her body was a mystery too, it reacted to the things she heard and saw so fast it felt like falling from a great height. She wasn’t sure why and no one bothered to tell her until Alex, her друг … her friend. She was different, she knew this and said as much too in the language they taught her. Little bites of English she tried to chew, different than the words the men around her spoke, and it rolled off her tongue in rough sounds. She was a fast learner, she picked things up quickly because she observed and absorbed all. But none of the words she learned sounded right to her ears or to her lips. What language did she truly know? When did she learn to speak? She tried in any language she could because she had something inside of her that wanted to come out, she just didn’t know what that was exactly. When her Alex left, he promised to send her books, things to read, things to fill up the inside of her where it was empty. Alex gave her something to hold on to when she had nothing else._

_And he gave her something else, something her mouth craved, something that filled her in a different way. She learned later it was sweetness. Maybe that was enough._

***

Kara took a deep breath and closed her eyes, something she sometimes had to do when she was sitting where she was sitting in Dr. M’s office. It helped her focus. It helped her close out the world for a little bit so she could stop listening for the cries of pain that never ended. If she closed her eyes, she didn’t have to see the way people looked at her or the way she saw through so many layers of steel and wood and dirt and skin that nothing resembled anything normal or real. Her body reacted to all of those things and it had taken years and practice to exist in this world where she was a superhero full of power and strength and hope and rage. That last one, the anger, was the one she was struggling with now.

“I wanted to give up…”

Kara keeps her eyes closed when she says things she doesn’t want anyone else to know. Dr. M never made her repeat them or clarify, here she could just say words out loud that no one else would hear without recoiling. In her mind, she thought of everytime she entertained this particular thought.

“When I realized that Krypton was gone and I was..stuck in a darkness that never ended.”

Would she ever get over the Phantom Zone and what it did to her? When she found out that Argo City survived, she had time here on earth to come to terms with what she thought she lost and what she still had. It meant that there was still time with her mom, still time to reconnect. But she kept coming back to that void and how it made her feel nothing at all.

“When the Black Mercy gave me only half of what it promised…when I was floating underwater for so long in National City bay...when I was trapped inside my own head when Reign nearly won....”

Here she paused and closed her eyes even tighter.

“When I was in the woods...with Alex..I could feel myself disappearing..”

Kara could only let herself briefly touch on the last one, where her doppleganger had nearly killed her. She had heard her own heartbeat slowing down, her body draining of the lifeforce and energy that kept her strong, kept her alive. It was like the other times when she had nearly given up and those times made her think about how it would end. Kara had considered herself impervious, unbreakable. Yes, she had thought about how she would outlast the humans she loved and cared about but what she hadn’t considered, truly, was her own mortality. It was too important for her, for Earth to be hopeful, to be the superhero who saved the day, that allowing for anything else was out of the question. She had to be better than that because she was the one who survived. And she just couldn’t...not.

Dr. M’s voice was quiet.

“But you didn’t give up, Kara.”

Kara let a little light in, her eyes opening to glance over at Dr. Meadows as the older woman looked at her. She spoke the words she felt.

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

She knew this was how they worked through things together, statements and questions all designed to get Kara to talk about the things she didn’t want to say or didn’t have someone to say them to. It didn’t make it any easier so she stared at Dr. Meadows like the answer was obvious.

“Because I can’t afford to. I’m Supergirl, you know that, I can’t just give up.”

It felt like Dr. M was on repeat.

“Why?”

“You know why. I can’t lose...I just..can’t.”

Kara kept having this same conversation over and over again. It took her back to a different time, a different place and she couldn’t help but remember.

*

_With a heave, Kara lifted off the door of a safe in Eve Teschmacher’s lead lined lab. She and Alex and Lena were looking for clues to finding Lex Luthor and Kara was getting desperate. The answer had to be somewhere close where their trusted, but ultimately turncoat friend and assistant had betrayed them all. Inside the safe, her eyes couldn’t believe what she saw and her voice was incredulous as she looked back at Lena._

_“That’s Harun-El.”_

_“Yes. It is.”_

_“You kept this?”_

_She couldn’t keep the sound of recrimination out of her voice. This was Krypton’s sacred stone, its source of energy, her mother’s one-time gift._

_“My mother told you how dangerous it is.”_

_Lena looked at her and spoke as Alex watched them both._

_“I didn’t keep it. I gave your mother what I had but I made more so I could realize its potential. All of my current research is based on this.”_

_Kara started putting two and two together and it hurt. Lena had been keeping secrets from her, doing research with the Harun-El and not sharing anything with her. And now, she finally realized what it meant and it made her angry. Lena Luthor made her choice to forget she loved Supergirl, to forget what they were to each other but that didn’t make it any easier. It made it harder in fact because in a perfect world where Lena hadn’t wiped away her memories, Kara was sure Lena never would have kept this secret from her._

_“This is how Lex had powers. Is that a part of your research, too?”_

_Lena tried to make her case, her voice elevating in defense._

_“This is why I didn’t want to work with you! Because every time I think things are getting better with us, you display an inherent distrust of my intentions. What is so wrong with helping humans protect themselves?”_

_“Because someone like Lex could get ahold of the technology and use it for evil which is exactly what happened!”_

_She was getting exasperated because lives were on the line right now and Lena’s own brother had used her technology to match her strength blow for blow and that meant no one was safe anymore. Lena looked at her and argued back._

_“You look past all of the good we’ve done and see red whenever you feel vulnerable.”_

_It hit a nerve and she held her tongue because she could feel the way her insides were heating up, the way the atoms on her skin jumped in disarray at the threat and the fear. Her Lena, the one who knew she was a superhero would have seen that easily and known her words were causing it. But this Lena, the one who chose to forget, didn’t love her like that, didn’t know to love her enough to understand. Alex’s voice tried to find a middle ground._

_“Lena saved Argo with this. She rescued Sam, she cured Bitsie’s cancer, and she saved James’ life.”_

_Kara tried to swallow Alex’s words and push it all down inside. It didn’t help that Alex didn’t know she was standing in the same room as her sister, Kara Danvers, or she too would have realized how hard this was and how afraid Kara was that Lex Luthor had the means, the motive, and the mind to destroy them all. Her Alex and her Lena would know what this was doing to her, the struggle and the weight of this news. Instead, it just made her feel alone. Kara looked down and said the only thing an unknown superhero could to the two people she cared about the most. She had to be the better one in this no matter the cost._

_“You’re right. You’re right. If you hadn’t made the Harun-El, James wouldn’t be alive and you saved him in a way I couldn’t.”_

_Kara took a deep breath and continued._

_“I do see red sometimes, and it’s not an ego thing or allegiance or..anything like that.”_

_She was doing her best to get the words out, to hold back what she felt, but it still came out in her voice and she knew, on the look of her face. But she needed them to understand even in their painful, unaware state, what this was doing to her, to Kara Zor-El, the one they forgot they loved._

_“I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders.”_

_Saying it out loud reminded her of how lonely she was right now._

_“And since Superman left and Lex has been free, it feels a lot heavier.”_

_Kara took a deep breath and looked at them both, willing them to understand._

_“If my enemies are strengthened, if I’m weakened in the slightest bit, I could lose. And I just can’t...I can’t lose.”_

*

Dr. Meadows was looking at her quietly and Kara glanced away, trying to put everything back together again inside where it was safe. She didn’t know where to begin again, how to tell the story of what it meant to be forgotten at a time when she needed to be known and supported and loved the most. It took her by surprise, really, to feel warmth in her belly at the thought of how close they had all come to losing the Earth to hate and Lex Luthor. She had to keep her identity separate from the two people who would have known how a superhero almost faltered. Kara had to re-keep her secret from both Alex and Lena at the same time and the weight of that at a time when she could ill-afford anything else on her shoulders finally clicked inside. She had lost something irreplaceable and so important to her that she hadn’t even realized what that loss was. Kara Zor-El had lost the comfort of being known, completely and truly, and it hurt so much that it made her feel something else entirely.

“Tell me what you’re feeling right now, Kara.”

At this, she put her hands on her head and leaned over, her elbows going to her knees to help hold the weight of what was inside of her. Kara squeezed her eyes shut again because if she didn’t, she knew what would happen to the hardwood floor of Dr. M’s office. Through clenched teeth, she let herself bite out words to a feeling that threatened to boil over inside of her.

“I..am..so angry…”

***

_When Alex came again, her head was full of words and words and words. She devoured every book he sent, watched every program on the small box in her room, thought so many thoughts that it filled her with what was missing inside. There was one book she came back to again and again, The Great Gatsby - it was beautiful in the way the words described a world she never knew, she practiced saying lush so she could talk about it with Alex if he asked. She wanted to be prepared, she wanted to answer any test he had for her correctly. It made her proud. Her body could do things, they tested her every day with what it could do, but this was different. Her mind had no limit and she could keep things in it that the men couldn’t see or have or test. She only shared such things with Alex because he was her only друг._

_And one time, he taught her a game. Black and white, it was so easy and clear to her. Each piece had its place and its way to move in the world. Some pieces had more power than others and if used right, the outcome was predictable. She sat in her room with Alex and moved the pieces from black to white to black. They talked and she got to practice her English. Alexander, The Great._

_“He conquers the world.”_

_They talk while they play and she smiled at his words._

_“This appeals to you?”_

_She watched as Alex looked away from her._

_“You sound like my sister.”_

_Alex’s sister. It was an abstract concept, a sister, a relative, and it had made her curious. She said the word, the first time it came off her lips in the presence of anyone else. She has been practicing it in her room full of peeling paint, piled books, and not much else._

_“Lena.”_

_She knew this name because she listened and watched carefully, she was not stupid. There was something there, in that name and in that person, that meant something. She just didn’t know what yet._

_“Yes. You pay attention.”_

_She watched Alex look at her more carefully before his eyes wandered down to the floor. She liked to watch when people talked because words were one thing, but the way a person looked when saying them were another. She could read every book Alex ever sent her and not learn as much as she did by observing how he looked while he talked._

_“You remind me of her sometimes. I used to think we were inseparable. That we were going to change everything.”_

_“What happened?”_

_Alex moved a piece on the board and didn’t look at her. She reminded him of Lena. She was like someone else, she was thought of in the same way as a mysterious woman in the world outside these four walls. She thought of the parties in West Egg at Jay Gatsby’s estate - socialites in beautiful clothes, eating extravagant food and lounging in chairs in lush greenery near the bay. Who was Lena? Was she a woman who would go to such parties? How could someone like that change the world? And how was she like Lena?_

_“People disappoint.”_


	4. Denab el Okab

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but what does that say about the strongest woman in the world? Kara Zor-El stopped counting how many times, how many ways, how many reasons that her life edged that thin line. Even on Earth, even with the miracle of the sun and what it did to her body, she was still at risk. Most of the time it didn’t bother her, she could shrug it off as the duties of a superhero, as the responsibility she assumed willingly. Kara hadn’t been saved from Krypton just to die on the next planet she fell to without doing the extraordinary things her mother told her she would do. She didn’t bend, she didn’t break. She was better than that, right?

Except.

Except no one survives the Phantom Zone without damage, no one truly forgets the unforgettable. Deafening silence. Permanent darkness. Infinite time. Was it any wonder that such a thing would catch up to her when she least expected it? She may be the strongest woman alive and still have her weaknesses. Now that she was on Earth, time began again and Kara didn’t want to lose any of it to feelings like anger and despair. She thought she had worked through that with Dr. Meadows and had come out on the other side.

Inside, though, she could feel it simmer and slow burn. All of it. The words of men buzzed in her ear. Lockwood, Manchester Black, President Baker, Lex Luthor. It did its damage on the inside, where no one else could see it and could contain or soothe.

“What makes you angry, Kara?”

Dr. Meadow’s voice was quiet but it rang in Kara’s ears like a klaxon. She tried to block out the rest of the sounds in her head, the loud silence that never ended, the last explosion of Krypton ringing in her ears for what felt like an eternity. With a deep breath, Kara lifted her head to interrupt the incessant buzz skipping over and over again. Blocking everything else out, her words focused on what stirred the fire in her belly.

“They tried to take things away from me. Every day I give everything I have for this planet, its people, my home. I would give my life for Earth, but it’s never enough...and..”

Each one had taken something different, something she valued, things that were hers. Ideas about who she was and what she stood for. She wasn’t innocent anymore, she was strong and proud, but they each sought to get inside and rip what she loved about Earth, about herself, from her.

“And?”

Dr. M’s gentle prompt made her eyes burn and Kara did her best, she tried, she really did. The strongest woman on earth wasn’t without need.

“And the two people I needed most...”

Dr. Meadows looked at her, already knowing the answer and saying it softly so Kara didn’t have to.

“Alex...and Lena...”

She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from letting acid tears spill out of her eyes at what she had lost. It wasn’t permanent, of course. She got them both back, mostly. It wasn’t necessarily rational to feel what she felt but Kara couldn’t help the way the atoms in her body sparked red. Her body turned the loss into anger in the absence of reason. She spent days and nights fighting against hate, fighting against her own country until her cape weighed her down. She would come home from working side by side with Alex and Lena as Supergirl and have to pretend Kara Danvers was fine. There was no space inside of her that was allowed to be angry about that.

“They left me..”

Kara could hear the anger in her voice for what Alex and Lena had done as a sacrifice for her. They each had their reasons and their ways, but in the end, they sacrificed their memories for a superhero. She shouldn’t feel the anger she did, they meant well, they were both afraid. But she was Supergirl and she couldn’t have the people she loved giving up any second of the time they had together. When she felt herself disappearing in the woods, leaking out life slowly but most definitely, Kara knew how little time there really was. To lose any of it with the people she loved and who loved her back, after all that wasted time in the Phantom Zone, made Kara mad. Pure and simple.

“Why?”

Kara found herself standing up, anything to release what was running through her body. She paced a bit in the room, willing herself to get control of the feelings that were driving her hands to clench. She stopped and turned her back to the window. Dr. M sat quietly looking at her, waiting patiently like she always did. Breathing out slowly, Kara crossed her arms over her chest.

“Because they thought it wasn’t safe for them to know who I really am.”

“Was it?”

“Of course not. The DEO was going to interrogate Alex and force her to tell them who I was. Lena was convinced Lex would use what she knew to hurt me. It was my secret they both chose to keep.”

***

_It was late, probably too late by most accounts for people still working at CatCo. Kara was used to it though, the coming and going at all hours for the story. Of course, she also spent nights there when no one could see her come and go, a superhero perching on top of a building to let whatever she had to face during the day fall off of her in the night sky. It was her refuge to shake off the weight, the air high above National City whipping out her cape like a crimson blanket as the bright lights of the news building under her blinked off slowly office by office. There were fewer and fewer places left where she wasn’t an obvious target - Supergirl, alien enemy - and it seemed like here she could exist without the world against her._

_Now, she found herself up on the roof in the middle of the night not with her cape on, but as Kara. Supergirl had come too close again, caught powerless in a trap by the Children of Liberty on Shelley Island and unable to escape. She hadn’t wanted to go home after that - Alex wouldn’t understand and Lena...Lena had forgotten that they were each other’s home away from home. Kara couldn’t show up at Lena’s penthouse in the middle of the night anymore to seek solace and a way to repair the damage being a superhero took on her. Every day that went by where both Alex and Lena knew nothing of what being Supergirl at a time like this did to her, did to Kara Zor-El and by necessity, did to Kara Danvers, was another day of holding it all up alone. No amount of time up on the roof of CatCo would solve that._

_“Whatcha working on?”_

_She found herself back inside of glass and steel and concrete, walking into the only other office with its lights on containing the only other person right now who might understand. James stopped his typing and looked up at her, his voice lacking its usual luster._

_“Hey. Um...you know, they made me say a lot of things in that camera today. Horrible things I don’t believe in. So I just wanna tell my side of the story about my time with the Children of Liberty.”_

_Their shared experience with hate ran deep and James was among the few who still knew why. Kara crossed her arms and looked away, thinking about what was going on in the world she so desperately wanted to save. Earth was starting to eat itself from within, poison seeping in across National City, across the United States, every place where fear was replacing hope. There were no good options._

_“Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about that, too. Duality.”_

_Kara let out a deep breath and sat down, feeling the weight. She thought a bit more, voicing her thoughts from her time alone and yet surrounded by so many._

_“How people can surprise you.”_

_They talked a bit about Manchester Black, the way he both betrayed and helped Supergirl. She should have known better, perhaps, that everyone had a dark side or at least something they kept others in the dark about. Even she kept secrets, even she held a darkness few knew or had seen. Kara wasn’t sure why she was surprised by the obvious. Looking at James, she shook her head._

_“Yeah, I guess people only show you what they want you to see. And that’s not always who they are.”_

_James looked at her with understanding, his words about how he had compromised himself clearly weighed on his mind. She could only blink and look down when he admitted that he had even risked her life, Supergirl’s life. There would always be hard choices, none of them immune to make bad ones in the name of what they thought was right at the time. It’s just that now there was no room for error, no room for mistakes, no room for compromising one’s identity when it could get someone killed. Kara knew this better than anyone but that was only half the battle. The rest of it came when inevitably the other side of the coin was turned over, dark places illuminated, secrets exposed._

***

Kara watched as Dr. M lifted a cup of tea to her lips, giving them both a moment of quiet. Kara had agonized over the choice Alex had made, tears spilling from her eyes as the implication of what would happen dawned on them both. J’onn would mindwipe Alex because there was no other choice. With Lena, the threat hadn’t been so imminent. Kara had tried to argue that what Lena was going to do to herself through science and technology was premature, was based on conjecture, was assuming that Lex Luthor could and would do his best to destroy them all. She followed the cup of tea with her eyes as Dr. Meadows carefully placed it on the small table next to her before she spoke to Kara.

“And you disagreed with that choice?”

“I..understood it. I keep my identity secret for a reason.”

“But you’re mad.”

Here, Kara took a moment, trying to untangle what was tangled inside, to unravel the mess that made her head and her heart ache for something she couldn’t name. _Nodus Tollens._ It was one of her obscure sorrows, pulled from Winn’s book gifted to her. The plot of her life didn’t make sense anymore. She thought she knew what she was supposed to do - survive Krypton, come to Earth to keep Kal-El alive, do extraordinary things. Much of that story arc happened, not all of it, not in the right order, all because of the way her pod spun around and around and around in the void of space until Kara wondered if she were alive or dead. Too many things repeated, too many paths diverged, too many beginnings and endings merged.

Kara practiced what Dr. M had taught her the last time after Psi, to look back from Point B to Point A, the stones in the path that got her from there to here. It was part of her story and she strung it together like a constellation of her own making to connect her journey from Krypton to the Phantom Zone to Earth. She let herself see the spaces in between as feelings, Kryptonian words that sounded out the notes of _ukiem_ to _udolkhehd_ to _shahrrehth_. Love to fear to hope. It wasn’t _iahron -_ anger, that she felt now, it was fear. And there was no room inside a superhero for fear so Kara had made no room for that.

Two steps forward, one step back. One door closes while another one opens.

It felt like something popped inside her, deflating the pressure until the only thing she felt now was tired. With a few steps, Kara sunk back down in the chair across from Dr. Meadows and felt everything drain out of her.

“I’m afraid.”

***

_She hated to leave and said as much, letting Mikhail know she was sorry. The ride back from the outskirts of the country was in silence. Everything was quiet, everything was white. Alex drove with his eyes to the road and she could only sit in the truck and watch the land around her pass by. The Compound came into view with its fencing and drab buildings and men with guns, men speaking in Russian as her ears picked up random words. Торопиться! Это началось! When they stopped inside, Alex slammed the door shut and she rushed to catch up._

_“I don’t understand. Why we are in such a hurry?”_

_It was then that she heard an explosion, louder than from the forest that first day when she had lifted into the air like a bird. Those sounds haunted her dreams and she whipped around in time to see a cloud of green infuse the air._

_“What is that?”_

_She barely got the words out before she felt acid in her veins, the ripping of her flesh from the inside out, a thousand knives slicing her. It was pain, pure and simple and it was killing her, she was sure of it. An immense wave of toxin overcame her and she fell to the ground hard and fast, writhing on the cold ground. She curled into herself as she heard Alex call out._

_“We got to get you inside!”_

_They dragged her like a sack of stones as the blood burned inside of her, She could barely walk and it was making her grit her teeth in agony. Surely Alex would stop this._

_“What is happening to me?”_

_The men wrested her into a chair_

_“There’s only one thing on this Earth that could hurt you and the Americans just seeded the skies with it.”_

_She groaned at the pain as her knees collapsed while the men forced her on to a hard stone stool. The Americans, the abstract concept of people elsewhere, she had read about in her books of history and literature. The Gatsbys and the Kennedys and the Reagans. A people too different from her to even fathom. They did this to her? She cried out as the pain seared into every cell in her body, her mouth finding the closest words to what she felt._

_“мне больно…”_

_It hurt so much she could barely breathe. Alex looked at her and she tried to listen, tried to hear his words._

_“You will never feel like this again. I will protect you. But there’s something we have to do first.”_

_She could barely focus as she watched Alex pull out a small box, inside it was glimmering gold on the edge of her consciousness._

_“Your flesh is weak. It’s the only time we can do this.”_

_Her face burned and flared and stung, nerves on fire and every ounce of her wanted to tear the skin from her body for relief. And then Alex hurt her more, her ears pierced with metal, studded gold and agonizing. She couldn’t keep herself still, his words barely registering._

_“Someday, you may have to match her.”_

_She managed to lift her head and force out a word._

_“Who?”_

_The walls around her came rushing up until she was cased in from all sides, held within a cell she could not see out of. The pain receded, replaced with images on all sides of her. A city of glass and red skies filled her vision and she could breathe again._

_“It’s time for you to know your full truth. You are strong. You are Kaznia. But you are also something more. You are one of the last daughters of Krypton.”_

_To her eyes, it was shining and bright in a way that her body could absorb. Instinctively, she knew she was looking at zehdh -- home in the language of her true mouth. She tasted the word as it left her lips._

_“Krypton.”_

_And then she watched it all disappear completely as it exploded into nothing. It was gone before she even knew it and the physical pain she had felt was replaced by something else entirely. Loss. Total and utter loss. When you have nothing and are given something only to watch it be destroyed into a million tiny pieces, you are left with only the feeling of loss, the phantom limb numbness of what is now missing. In an instant, it transformed inside her and loss was replaced by anger, despair by vengeance. There was no room in her for anything else but the darkness. She only knew what she had been given and what had been taken. And the person who did the taking? She looked into the mirror and saw herself looking back._


	5. Bezek

It was a paradox, really, to have been driven almost mad by silence and darkness and yet crave it still. Each were more than a sensory thing, each had become something embedded into her skin and into her cells and into her mind like blood and memories. When the bright yellow sun and its hydrogen changed her body in ways that made her stronger, made her super, it couldn’t quite erase what the quiet and the dark meant to her body. Tranquility in oblivion. Peace in torpor. Kara Zor-El hadn’t survived on the edges of life without having found a way to harness it to feed what made her who she was. There were two sides to everything. Hope was found in the smallest of sounds, her own heartbeat, in deep silent space. Help came from the pinpricks of three dots of light in her pod console as it skirted the edge of an event horizon. Compassion came from finally forgiving herself for living when everyone else had died.

Now, Kara stood with her back against the wall of Dr. Meadow’s office with her eyes closed tightly and shut every noise in National City and beyond out of her ears. It helped her think, it helped her manage the turmoil inside. Anger and fear were what she felt and it wasn’t like she didn’t have reason. There were plenty of reasons. Loss, grief, abandonment, betrayal. Dr. M had tried to tell her before that these things were normal, universal even. Dr. M always had some clever way of framing things, some answer that was reasonable, logical - that didn’t make her feel any better. With the world shut out for a few moments, she let herself feel the worst. After all, it was always darkest before dawn.

***

_“I’m supposed to kill you, you know.”_

_It was strange, to see oneself looking back with a blank resolve and a revolver. The Kasnian replica of sat on the end of the bed in a disguise that didn’t hide how her eyes looked like Kara’s. The words coming from this version of herself were thickly accented, cold, matter of fact. Kara tried not to think about the acid burn of the Kryptonite in her lap as it wormed its way into her body like nails of fire._

_“I see that. Kryptonite makes me soft. I bleed, you shoot me.”_

_Kara cleared her throat, the pain slicing into her with every breath as her veins filled with poison. There was something inside the woman who hid behind a wig and a desire to harm America and its superhero with it. There was a spark, a thread to connect them._

_“I went to Kasnia. I saw those pictures you have of me, my sister…”_

_What name she didn’t say out loud was also in those pictures taped to a cell wall of peeling paint, prominent and clear as day. Lena Luthor. Kara didn’t dare tempt the beast that lived in her and likely lived in both. Her doppleganger narrowed her eyes at the discovery and spoke quietly._

_“Know thy enemy.”_

_“Please don’t do this. We are the same. We have the same genes, the same…”_

_She didn’t get a chance to say ‘heart’ but that’s what she meant. They loved the same things even if her Russian counterpart tried to deny it._

_“Ah..I see. We’ve come to the part where the villain says ‘We are not so different, you and I.’”_

_Kara shook her head._

_“I am not a villain.”_

_Thick words and cold eyes looked back at her._

_“The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.”_

_“Lex Luthor sent you here, right?”_

_At the name, Kasnian eyes looked at her as if something had died inside, the flicker of what connected them was tenuous. What must it be like for her? To be used as a thing, to be manipulated, to be betrayed about what it meant to be loved and to love. Kara knew they were the same, but she was starting to realize what it must have taken for them to be so different. She knew what it meant to be the strongest woman in the world with a weakness. She knew what it must have taken to break and bend and distort what gave them both strength. To love is to bury the demons hidden and now they were laid bare between them._

_“So once you do his bidding, what’s he going to do to you? You’re a loose end. Everything he’s told you, he’s lying. He hurts people. For god’s sake, just look him up.”_

_She was desperate, the Kryptonite making her so. Time was running out and the pain was getting worse. It made her say things, to tell the truth to someone who believed otherwise, who had been told lies, had been fed when deprived, given sweetness in the absence of anything at all. Kara could feel that inside of her, the parts of her that were the same hummed underneath their skin. She had seen that cell and she knew what Lex was capable of and it wasn’t too hard to feel what drove her Kasnian heart to want something of her own when she had nothing._

_“He did those things in service to the world. You are so limited. Your life could mean so much, and yet you fly around in a cheerleader skirt. How did they do it? What did they say to make you believe?”_

_Kara listened, trying to find a way to understand what had gone wrong when her mirror image asked the same of her. The heavy words kept coming as Red Daughter walked to stand in front of her, silencer on her gun hanging at her side._

_“Look out the window and you will see fear, racism, strife. This country is a fatted heifer.”_

_Kara was losing the connection, sharp eyes and sharper words replacing the space between them._

_“I am here to cut its throat. But first…admit that you were wrong. Go on. That you defend the corrupt. The American dream is snake oil.”_

_Kryptonite was working its way into both of them, winding and breaking down the cells they shared._

_“Who sold it to you? Was it your Alex?”_

_Kara swallowed and steeled herself. They were both in a shaky place, finding the things that hurt the most and digging in like the Kryptonite itself. She tried a different approach, one that touched on their differences._

_“You know, for saying that you want to know your enemy, you don’t know me at all. For instance, that pain you’re feeling...you’ve only felt it for the past couple of months. But me..”_

_Here, Kara took in a deep breath and remembered what it felt like to be a Kryptonian on planet earth with one true threat to the body that made her super._

_“I’ve been dealing with Kryptonite for 15 years.”_

_There were advantages to pain, advantages to having lived with it for so long in so many forms. It made her stronger, it made her resilient, it made her fly. Kara used her advantage to break the chains that held her, kicking out of the chair and throwing off her Kasnian chimera just enough to escape. As she broke her bonds and threw herself out the window, Kara felt where the bullet landed, searing into her weakened bicep like a broken wing. The further she fell away from someone who looked like her, the less the poison stung. It was expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Kara flew away from something she would have to confront again -- what could have been had she not landed where she did with the people who helped make her what she became._

***

“Kara…do you want to talk about it?”

In all that silence and all that darkness in her own head, Kara startled and blinked at Dr. Meadows’ quiet words. She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there, hands in fists at her side, head down. When she looked up, Dr. M was regarding her with gentle eyes. Shutting out the world in this room helped, but she also knew that she had come here for a reason. There was still time and there was still the need to extract the poison that held on even when her body had healed.

“There is no room in my life to be afraid.”

There was the weight of being a superhero who couldn’t afford to feel fear, yes, but there was something else that was on the edge of what brought her here. Dr. Meadows looked at her and nodded her head.

“Kara. The world is a big place and you have made room to be kind without limits. You have made room for the people and things you love. You have made room for a life that expands outward, that is larger than you can imagine. Your heart knows no bounds.”

Kara let out a breath and lifted her chin, ready to counter with all the reasons why it wasn’t enough that came bubbling up inside of her. She watched Dr. M lift her hand a little to continue.

“But the world is a big place. And it holds space for all things. The room we make for our lives has no walls. If it did, nothing would get in and nothing would get out. Your heart has no limits, Kara, you contain multitudes. There is room enough in you for all things too.”

Sometimes Dr. M said things that didn’t make sense. Sometimes she said things Kara didn’t like. And sometimes she said things that didn’t make it any easier for Kara to be who she was in this world. A world where everything could slip away from her in an instant.

***

_“Eliza?”_

_Kara had flown as fast as she could, cutting through the air with a growing sense of dread. Midvale called and she carefully walked through the house she had grown up in here on earth. It was one of the few places where she could feel peace and belonging, a home where she could be normal. It smelled the same, it wasn’t in disarray, but she knew Red Daughter was here._

_“Kara…”_

_Eliza’s voice sounded afraid as she was led out into the living room by her replica, the Kasnian supergirl who was sent to destroy her and America with it. In that moment, Kara realized that all parts of her life were in jeopardy and she didn’t have the one person who could help. Alex didn’t know that she stood in the house they grew up in as a superhero and as a kid sister and Eliza was in danger. Her voice cracked at what Red Daughter could do to her life._

_“Don’t hurt her please.”_

_“I’ve been here for hours. You have all these..things. You think they will make you whole? I had none of it.”_

_The difference between the two of them was stark and painful and raw and Kara could see what that could do to someone. She offered hope in the only way she knew how._

_“You can still have it.”_

_Red Daughter’s voice spit out her words._

_“I don’t want it.”_

_Sometimes it was hard to want out loud, to admit the desire for something that could be taken away. Saying it out loud meant it could be lost. Kara understood that just as well as the part of her who had a limited life with limited options. Red Daughter had let herself care in spite of everything. She could deny wanting, but they were more similar than Kara had realized. And now, they were at war with each other out of fear._

***

“Dr. Meadows, do you know how it feels to die alone?”

It wasn’t a fair question, she knew that, but it was the one that was on her mind. And if Dr. M was going to say the things she did, then Kara could say what she wanted too. She had felt completely alone in the woods, darkness seeping in, no one to know she was leaving. When Kara had been punched in the chest, she had felt the paralyzing shock course through her body in waves of purple. Red Daughter had evolved a new weapon in all that isolation, all that time with Lex Luthor and it was as deadly as Kryptonite. It was the power of loss, harnessed and weaponized enough to stop the strongest and most vulnerable part of them both. She didn’t wait for a response before her voice grew quiet.

“I heard my own heart beating until...it stopped.”

Kara sank down the wall in Dr. M’s office until she was sitting, hugging her knees because she didn’t know what else to do with the memory of how it felt to sink into oblivion. It was like she had disappeared completely. It was like the Phantom Zone all over again, except now she was losing an entirely new life, the one she had created on Earth with Alex and Eliza and J’onn and Cat and James and Winn and Querl Dox and Nia and...and Lena. Everything she had let herself want and have again after Krypton was now draining out of her body. Kara closed her eyes when the tears she couldn’t hold back any longer started falling.


	6. Fortitudo

There was total darkness and deafening silence, yes, that was the Phantom Zone. It was every nightmare someone who was now fueled by light and life could have. There was something else, though, that sung in her. Around and around she had spun in total darkness and so much silence it made her ears and her eyes afterthoughts when she thought she had no thoughts to have. That spin around a distant event horizon was like passing through an infinite life on repeat and realizing something is slightly off each time you pass the beginning. It was a record on repeat, the same song different every time. All Kara Zor-El needed to do was pick the needle up at the scratch and realize that the noise her ears finally heard was the near miss and not the crash. Her eyes focused not on the black hole spinning her into the void but the pinpricks of light on the other side.

“Kara…”

She heard her name and somehow, her body felt something. On her arm, there was a warm touch and it was enough for her to blink her eyes open and take a deep breath, inhaling the world again. Dr. Meadows was crouched in front of her, gray eyes looking at her gently.

“Oh.”

It was all she could think to say.

“You’re in my office, Kara. You’re in National City. You’re here.”

Kara looked around and everything came back into focus, the wood floor, the tasteful mid-century couch, the pale blue walls, the way the light streamed into the room. She felt herself lifted and she rose slowly, knees bending, feet planting. She stood, taller than the gray haired woman who held her elbow as if she were someone was going to take baby steps. Kara fought the urge to pull her arm away from the help and instead took in another breath.

“I’m fine..”

She found her voice and gave a head nod, her body settling back into something steady, her taut muscle holding strong bone together under a tough skin. Kara felt the weight shift a little, her hips and shoulders adjusting until she was herself again. As she made her way to the couch, she looked at Dr. M and ran a hand through her hair. The older woman watched her carefully as they both sat.

“Really. I’m going to be okay.”

“You are.”

It was an affirmation and a conclusion and it was enough for now. Kara was realizing that being her meant that there was something else that held on and kept her alive when others might have given up. Was that a miracle or was it just luck, a random chunk of a dying planet that threw her pod off course in the first place?

“Sorry, I..um..thought I was.. better.. at this.”

It was her first instinct, to apologize for having feelings and for showing them even if she knew that her feelings made her stronger. Superheroes needed to rise above. They needed to be what others couldn’t.

“Kara...you went through something very traumatic. It affected you. It will affect you for a long time. Just like everything else you’ve been through. You don’t have to be better at that. We take the time we take to move to a different place with what happened to us.”

She shook her head, trying to clear it from a dark forest where she sank into the ground. Kara sat on the edge of the couch and put her palms on soft yellow fabric.

“My head knows that you are right. We’ve talked..about this. I just want my heart to catch up and stop feeling like…”

“Like?”

Kara reached across her chest and held her arm, muscle under her hand flexing and reminding herself that she was strong, that her body did miraculous things but it took more than that to be her.

“Like I’m always waiting for how it will feel when everything falls apart.”

She looked over at Dr. M and took a breath, holding it and herself. It was a kid fear, one born of a broken planet and a search for something solid when that didn’t exist in the world she lived in. Gray eyes looked at her kindly and gentle words followed.

“What if, instead, you imagined how it felt when everything fit together?”

Dr. Meadows softly continued.

“What if you let yourself live in each moment without a particular end in sight?"

Kara tried, she really did. A record on repeat, a circle instead of a line, a possibility instead of an absolute.

"What if you believed that you are exactly who you were meant to be, right here, right now.”

Who was she, exactly? The last daughter of Krypton? Or just Kara Zor-El who was also Kara Danvers was also Supergirl. All of those things and she knew that there were more of her out there, in pieces and on different earths. The good and the bad and all that came with being fractured and splintered by time and experience and realities known and unknown. It didn’t make it any more clear, it just made her wonder as she sat on a couch in National City and closed her eyes briefly.

So many things fit together. The Danvers, Alex, her job at CatCo the way Supergirl had become something more than anything she could have ever imagined. In many ways, she could not have predicted that her life would hold the kind of joy it did, the purpose, her newfound family and friends. The way her heart had fallen for humans with all their faults and struggles. The way her heart felt about Lena, hopeful and cautious and more human than Kara could have imagined herself feeling. She could not have known that this would be her life, full of perfectly imperfect moments strung together. Despite everything, she knew she wouldn’t be who she was now, stronger yet wiser, if it hadn’t been for all that had come before. That was the key that could unlock everything. She opened her eyes and blew out a breath.

“You said earlier that I contained multitudes.”

Dr. M smiled at her and nodded.

“I did.”

Kara felt a flicker inside of her, a lost piece of her who had lived a life and who had loved it too, in her own way and in a way that now settled deep in her. Red Daughter had sacrificed herself for Kara and maybe it was a sign of things to come. She would always give herself up for something she believed in and loved even if it meant losing, even if it meant that things would have to fall apart to make way for something new, for other things to fit together in a different way. Maybe that was okay, to have endings and beginnings tangle all together into something new.

“What if that means I have that many more opportunities to change the world for the better?”

Dr. M smiled at her and nodded her head.

“There you go. Hope. Help. Compassion. That’s how you change the world, Kara.”

She looked over at the small pillow with those words on it and knew those things were what made her special. Even if she had every superpower in the known universe, the thing that set her apart was the thing that beat inside her chest right now. Her head didn’t have to do all the work and think her way out of this, her heart always won the day in the end. She knew this, even if there were moments of doubt, times when it felt heavier than she could carry. Sometimes she just needed a reminder that what happened to her in the past didn’t define her, it was what she did with all those moments of possibilities that could change the future, not only for her but for everyone who needed her to be exactly who she was. Kara let out a breath and felt herself smile. She was ready to begin again.

***

The sun felt brighter, the sky more blue, the trees full of leaves that created a green canopy as Kara closed the brownstone door behind her and walked down each step. She took a deep breath of air as her ribs expanded and she smiled, her body feeling more herself than it had in a long time. She felt whole again as the sounds of National City filled her ears in a soft way, not in a cacophony.

“Hey you.”

At the familiar voice, Kara looked over and smiled. Leaning up against a tree with her arms crossed was one Alex Danvers, sister and welcome sight. In jeans and a black jacket, she was dressed for a day off and not a DEO recon mission. Kara laughed.

“What are you doing here?”

Alex sidled up to her and hooked her elbow into Kara’s as they walked together down the street. Kara gave her a side eye as a smile crossed her sister’s lips mischievously.

“Playing hooky from work.”

She almost stopped them both in the middle of the crosswalk but felt herself tugged along.

“Alex Danvers skipping work? Is this another earth where you’re the cool sister now?”

Kara let herself be moved by the shoulder bump Alex gave her.

“You’re funny. Maybe you should do standup at the ice cream shop we’re going to.”

“Ice cream! You scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

She watched Alex roll her eyes as they kept walking. They fell back into their routine as if second nature, not wanting to lose another moment after everything.

“Five scoops of rocky road and all the dad jokes you can tell, they won’t know what hit them. The Danvers sisters back in the saddle again.”

Kara laughed as the world around them continued. Cars drove by, buses stopped, people walked, the city hummed. She could spend a little more time doing normal things, enjoying the moment she was in and not worrying about what came next. There were still things to hold and to carry, conversations still to have, thoughts to think and feelings to feel. Her first order of business after this was to text Lena and talk, really talk, about what happened. All of those things and so much more awaited her, but for now, Kara Zor-El could just take a breath and be normal for a little longer, eat some ice cream with Alex while National City whirled back into action and she let her body settle back into itself.

Everything was calm, everything was golden.


End file.
